Where Does LSU Football Go From Here After 44-34 Loss to Mississippi State?
It's the question on fans, coaches and players minds alike after the defending national champs were upset by Mississippi State on Saturday night. There were issues across the board but the message from coach Ed Orgeron and players was pretty much consistent.
"Best thing we can do right now is not point fingers. Don’t attack people. I can make a promise we are going to get it fixed," safety JaCoby Stevens said.
"I told them to put it on me, when they win I give them the credit but when we lose I gotta take the blame," Orgeron said. "I gotta coach them better. I asked everybody to look at themselves in the mirror, let's get better and let's stick together as a football team. We've gotta a lot of football left."
It's an important mindset to have as the Tigers will try and spend the next few days fixing some of the problems that cropped up in the Week One loss to the Bulldogs. It's important that the constructive criticism doesn't fall on deaf ears because guys are upset about the program's first loss in nearly two years.
Not destroying the confidence of these young players LSU will be relying on the rest of the season is also an important factor because as Saturday afternoon saw, players got tight down the stretch trying to not make mistakes.
Offensively, it was a slow start to the day but the Tigers were able to find some rhythm in the second half. The offensive line had its moments but the protection was inconsistent and there weren't many running lanes for the backs throughout the afternoon.
Defensively, the front seven was able to get pressure on Bulldogs quarterback KJ Costello at times, forcing four turnovers. But a poor performance from the vaunted secondary ultimately killed some great individual outings.
Myles Brennan said after the game that the key for the team this week is to correct mistakes while at the same time picking up players who had a rough start to the season.
"Leadership is going to be crucial from here on out," Brennan said. "Just keeping everybody's heads up. This is the first game of many and we've got a lot of football ahead of us. We're not gonna crumble and quit now. We've got a long road ahead, so keeping everybody upbeat and being open to fixing mistakes will be the biggest thing this week."
Where the secondary goes from here is a question that will need to be answered as there were clearly some players that Mississippi State was attacking. Getting Derek Stingley back next week should help alleviate matters to some degree but he can only do so much.
An entire half and middle of the field still needs to be accounted for and being in the right positions and tackling are a few areas that LSU struggled with but can clean up. The offensive line will have plenty of protection breakdowns to analyze, receivers will have drops to answer for and Brennan himself will have a few throws he’ll study and want back.
It's important that in those environments, guys aren't feeling attacked, which was one of the consistent messages following the loss. It had been 671 days since LSU had lost a game. Stevens and Brennan were of course on that team that lost to Texas A&M and that feeling is something neither wants to experience again this season.
"Losing sucks, no one wants to lose but we can't blame anybody, we've gotta fix our mistakes and move forward," Brennan said.
"I’m a sore loser, I don’t like losing, I get mad when I lose. I would throw a fit as a child if I lost," Stevens added. "It’s not a good feeling in my mouth right now. I’m going to go back and do what I need to do to figure out how to not have this happen again this year."
